'BLEU BLANC ROUGE': Christopher Anderson

The Ravestijn Gallery presented ‘Bleu Blanc Rouge’, an exhibition featuring new work by American photographer Christopher Anderson. In this playful and poetic series, Andersons ties images together in a stimulating way: portraits, candid moments, still lifes. They are photographs taken in passing, carefully arranged together. Some of these images tell a clear story; others are less straightforward or even stray towards the abstract. By showing these divergent, isolated moments as a collection, Anderson invites viewers to make connections themselves and to question their meaning and coherence.

A close-up of a face, spilled cherries, the interior of a car. Light reflected in a puddle of rain or in the windows of a skyscraper. Anderson presents his images as pieces of a puzzle. The common thread that unifies the images is formed by recurring visual elements: the colour red, specific forms and patterns, a spectrum of sunlight that marks the end of day. The palette is charged with a particular emotionality and intimacy that is at the heart of Anderson’s image. The images are both contemplative and urgent at the same time. Anderson’s photographs are not just observations of a fleeting moment. Rather, we feel the presence of the photographer and his connection to the moment depicted.

Together, the images in ‘Blue Blanc Rouge’ , captured in the United States, France, Italy, Spain and Germany, depict a vision that flirts with the language of cinema. The dynamic between movement and stillness in ‘Bleu Blanc Rouge’ resembles a series of stills from a never- made movie. Each image is a moment distilled from a larger narrative, just as the city is a mosaic of different lives, stories and captured moments.

Christopher Anderson, a member of Magnum Photos, is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. He first gained recognition in 1999 when he boarded a small wooden boat loaded with with 44 Haitian immigrants trying to sail to America. The boat sank in the Caribbean. The images, commissioned by the New York Times Magazine, would receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2000.

Since then, Anderson’s work has defied categorization as he slips between the worlds of documentary, art, commercial and fashion photography. From 2011 to 2013 Christopher was New York Magazine’s first ever “Photographer in Residence”, a collaboration that helped shaped the current visual identity of the magazine. Christopher photographed the last portrait sitting of President Barack Obama in the White House and the first of Donald Trump in the Oval Office.

The author of five monographs of photography, his most recent, Approximate Joy, was published by Stanley Barker in 2018. Christopher was born in western Canada and grew up in Texas. Christopher was naturalized as a French citizen in 2017.